There is a disconnect in America right now and I have a theory about it.
The disconnect shows up in the polling showing women switching their votes to Palin from Obama since her selection as the VP nominee.
The unlikely bond which has formed overnight continues to defy reason.
How can women who have the most to lose by the elevation of Gov. Palin to icon status, vote against their own self-interest?
I suggest we take a close look at the seriousness of the problem of battered women in our country. Some statistics first from the Family Violence Prevention Fund below the fold:
http://endabuse.org/...
1.Estimates range from 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend per year, or 1 to three million women who are physically abused by their husband or boyfriend per year.
2 Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime.
3 Nearly one-third of American women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to a 1998 Commonwealth Fund survey.
4 Nearly 25 percent of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime, according to the National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted from November 1995 to May 1996.
5 Thirty percent of Americans say they know a woman who has been physically abused by her husband or boyfriend in the past year.
6 In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner.
7 Intimate partner violence is primarily a crime against women. In 2001, women accounted for 85 percent of the victims of intimate partner violence (588,490 total) and men accounted for approximately 15 percent of the victims (103,220 total).
8 While women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
9 In 2001, intimate partner violence made up 20 percent of violent crime against women. The same year, intimate partners committed three percent of all violent crime against men.
10 As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy.
11 Women of all races are about equally vulnerable to violence by an intimate.
12 Male violence against women does much more damage than female violence against men; women are much more likely to be injured than men.
13 The most rapid growth in domestic relations caseloads is occurring in domestic violence filings. Between 1993 and 1995, 18 of 32 states with three year filing figures reported an increase of 20 percent or more.
14 Women are seven to 14 times more likely than men to report suffering severe physical assaults from an intimate partner.
Domestic Homicides
15.On average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day. In 2000, 1,247 women were killed by an intimate partner. The same year, 440 men were killed by an intimate partner.
- Women are much more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. In 2000, intimate partner homicides accounted for 33.5 percent of the murders of women and less than four percent of the murders of men.
17 Pregnant and recently pregnant women are more likely to be victims of homicide than to die of any other cause
18.and evidence exists that a significant proportion of all female homicide victims are killed by their intimate partners.
- Research suggests that injury related deaths, including homicide and suicide, account for approximately one-third of all maternal mortality cases, while medical reasons make up the rest. But, homicide is the leading cause of death overall for pregnant women, followed by cancer, acute and chronic respiratory conditions, motor vehicle collisions and drug overdose, peripartum and postpartum cardiomyopthy, and suicide.
One third of American women have been abused by men sometime in their life. So 50 million of them bear some emotional scars, however faded from memory those scars may be.
Let's assume only 10% or 5 million women have carried the anger towards the male gender forward to this point in time. I am sure the percentage it is much larger than that but rather than be labeled an alarmist before I can make my point, I have scaled it down.
My theory is that the hard core women who carry justifiable anger with them every day ,as a demo, may not act in their own self-interest at times because of their emotional state.
This type of woman when given a choice between ANY man and ANY woman will tend to lean towards the female candidate.
These women ,in my opinion, leaned towards Hillary Clinton in the primaries. They did not make up the majority of Hillary's support by any means but they may have been a sizable demo. Logically they probably are also the group most disheartened by the selection of Biden rather than Sen. Clinton for VP.
With the selection of Palin they are left with one choice. Bear in mind that very few people follow politics on an every day basis as we bloggers do.We should not expect they would be as familiar with the issues as we are.
So I feel based on the anger towards the opposite gender they have moved in great numbers the past 2 weeks to Sarah Palin.
How do we attract this demo (which may represent as much as 5 or 10 million,or 6% of American female voters) back to the fold. How do we convince them that we understand why they might see Sarah as a symbol of a woman making it in a society dominated by males (30% of whom have abused a woman at some time in their life); we understand it and empathize with their feelings.
Following this path of identifying with them, makes it difficult to point out how, by voting for Palin, they are in fact empowering the very group of men who were more likely to have battered them emotionally and physically. It won't be easy but there are votes to be had in this group.